Assays for analysis of biological processes are exploited for a variety of desired applications. For example, monitoring the activity of key biological pathways can lead to a better understanding of the functioning of those systems as well as those factors that might disrupt the proper functioning of those systems. In fact, various different disease states caused by operation or disruption of specific biological pathways are the focus of much medical research. By understanding these pathways, one can model approaches for affecting them to prevent the onset of the disease or mitigate its effects once manifested.
A stereotypical example of the exploitation of biological process monitoring is in the area of pharmaceutical research and development. In particular, therapeutically relevant biological pathways, or individual steps or subsets of individual steps in those pathways, are often reproduced or modeled in in vitro systems to facilitate analysis. By observing the progress of these steps or whole pathways in the presence and absence of potential therapeutic compositions, e.g., pharmaceutical compounds or other materials, one can identify the ability of those compositions to affect the in vitro system, and potentially beneficially affect an organism in which the pathway is functioning in a detrimental way. By way of specific example, a variety of kinase enzymes have been identified as key pathway components in a number of therapeutically relevant biological pathways, as they will often phosphorylate different substrate proteins upon the binding of different effector compounds, e.g., cytokines, to receptors on biological proteins, e.g., cell surface receptors. By modeling the kinase reaction system in vitro, and testing it against libraries of potential pharmaceutical candidates, one can identify the compounds which best inhibit or enhance the reaction in question.
Typically, modeled biological systems rely on bulk reactions that ascertain general trends of biological reactions and provide indications of how such bulk systems react to different effectors. While such systems are useful as models of bulk reactions in vivo, a substantial amount of information is lost in the averaging of these bulk reaction results. In particular, the activity of and effects on individual molecular complexes cannot generally be teased out of such bulk data collection strategies.
Single-molecule real-time analysis of nucleic acid synthesis has been shown to provide powerful advantages over nucleic acid synthesis monitoring that is commonly exploited in sequencing processes. In particular, by concurrently monitoring the synthesis process of nucleic acid polymerases as they work in replicating nucleic acids, one gains advantages of a system that has been perfected over millions of years of evolution. In particular, the natural nucleic acid synthesis processes (e.g., DNA-dependent DNA synthesis, DNA-dependent RNA synthesis, RNA-dependent RNA synthesis and RNA-dependent cDNA synthesis) provide the ability to copy information from genomic DNA or replicate RNA genomes in extremely short periods of time, and do so with an extremely high level of fidelity to the underlying template being replicated.